Today marks the end of an era, the end of The Pirate Bay tracker. The website is still up and running, but the owners of The Pirate Bay have decided to turn off their tracker and will not be re-enabling the tracker, leaving the DHT enabled for now.

With the end of The Pirate Bay, the largest BitTorrent on the Internet, it appears that the courts have finally made an impact on pirating around the world. This makes a success for MPAA and RIAA, finally managing to get enough service providers to disconnect The Pirate Bay, making it extremely difficult for them to relocate and keep the site running.

Now it appears that millions of users won't be able to download torrents, but only rely on DHT to download files. The Pirate Bay seems to be slowly sinking with more crushing blows delivered by the MPAA and RIAA, but this blow is the effect that the tracker has become slow and an unreliable method to download.

Aside from the shutdown of the world's largest BitTorrent tracker, there is silent discussion about a major development that will replace BitTorrent forever. TorrentFreak mentioned that the owners of The Pirate Bay are talking with other BitTorrent website owners to replace the p2p protocol.